The related application discloses a new form or type of integrated circuit, referred to as an adaptive computing engine (“ACE”) or adaptive computing machine (“ACM”), which is readily reconfigurable, in real time, and is capable of having corresponding, multiple modes of operation. The ACM is a new and innovative hardware platform suitable for digital signal processing, Telematics, and other applications where small hardware footprint, low power consumption and high performance characteristics are highly desirable.
The ACE architecture for adaptive or reconfigurable computing, includes a plurality of different or heterogeneous computational elements coupled to an interconnection network. The plurality of heterogeneous computational elements include corresponding computational elements having fixed and differing architectures, such as fixed architectures for different functions such as memory, addition, multiplication, complex multiplication, subtraction, configuration, reconfiguration, control, input, output, and field programmability. In response to configuration information, the interconnection network is operative in real time to adapt (configure and reconfigure) the plurality of heterogeneous computational elements for a plurality of different functional modes, including linear algorithmic operations, non-linear algorithmic operations, finite state machine operations, memory operations, and bit-level manipulations.
As a consequence, the interconnection network and other ACE hardware need to be configured and generally also reconfigured, either statically or dynamically, to perform any given application or algorithm.
The ACE architecture also utilizes a data flow model for processing. More particularly, input operand data will be processed to produce output data (without other intervention such as interrupt signals, instruction fetching, etc.), whenever the input data is available and an output port (register or buffer) is available for any resulting output data. Controlling the data flow processing to implement an algorithm, however, presents unusual difficulties, including for controlling data flow in the communication and control algorithms used in a wide variety of applications, such as wideband CDMA (“WCDMA”) and cdma2000.
Given this new and unique adaptive computing integrated circuit architecture, a need remains for a method, system and software to program and configure the adaptive computing architecture (or device), either statically or dynamically, to perform one or more applications